A new kind of country.

The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism, by George McKenna (Yale, 448 pp., $35)

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A FEW months ago, I was walking in a liberal neighborhood in Boston--or is that redundant? Anyway, I was brought up short by one of the gloomiest-looking bumper stickers I'd ever seen: It showed the Stars and Stripes, not in the customary bright colors but in especially drab black and white, accompanied by the words "SIN OF PRIDE." I felt appropriately chastened, even though I didn't know which specific national offenses had occasioned the motorist's Puritanical wrath.

Puritanical? You bet. The bumper sticker was addressing contemporary politics in the severest language of moral chastisement and moral aspiration--and I think the Puritans who lived in that neighborhood some 350 years ago would have recognized in it the work of a kindred spirit.

One of the year's best books, George McKenna's The Puritan Origins of American Patriotism, addresses the persistence of such Puritan habits of thought in American history. Don't be discouraged by the title: The book is not a dry account of the political-philosophy debates of cheerless 17th-century Calvinist divines (which is an inaccurate stereotype, in any case), but an engaging narrative of the three subsequent centuries in America. McKenna, professor emeritus at City College of the City University of New York, takes roughly 30 pages to explain Puritan thought in its own context--and then it's off to the races, for an invigorating reading of how Puritan ideas have manifested themselves in American politics and culture.

"When the stakes are high," writes McKenna, "American political leaders go back to the narrative and even the language of the Puritans.... It is Biblical, prophetic language, the language of sermons and jeremiads." The phenomenon of nationalism is well-known in history: It basically involves believing my nation is right ... because it's my nation. What the Puritans were trying to establish was something new under the sun: a nation that would have to do without the crutch of nationalism, a nation called to live up to the standard of actually being right. When John Winthrop said we were to be "a City upon a Hill," writes McKenna,

   he meant it not as a boastful claim that New England was going to
   be a beacon to the world but rather as a warning that, as he put
   it, "the eyes of all people are upon us." If America breaks its
   covenant, "we shall shame the faces of many of God's worthy
   servants and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us
   till we be consumed out of this good land whither we are going."

The Puritan/American sense of nationhood is thus the farthest thing imaginable from mere flag-waving jingoism.

What has long impressed foreign observers, McKenna correctly points out, "is that, unlike the patriotism of the Old World, [American patriotism] is not tied to blood or soil but is a dynamic blend of Judeo-Christianity and political liberalism." And "dynamic" is certainly the key word: One of the book's most arresting themes is that certain groups once demonized within the mainstream WASP culture eventually became pillars of old-fashioned patriotism.

To the original Puritans, Catholicism represented Antichrist; in the 1770s, their descendants' anger at the British government's Quebec Act--which granted religious liberty to Catholics in Canada--helped touch off the American Revolution. "Anti-Catholicism," McKenna writes, "was not an adventitious element in American patriotic rhetoric, a prejudice that sometimes got attached to it, like racial prejudice or anti-Semitism ... but a foundational premise in the American narrative handed down by the Puritans." The struggle against Catholicism was what political scientists today would call a fundamental "clash of civilizations."

And yet behold: In 2007, Catholics are a demographic group especially noted for full-throated American patriotism, and evangelicals--the most vigorous branch within Protestantism, which is still the majority religion in the U.S.--largely view anti-Catholicism as a bigoted embarrassment from the distant past. What happened? Put simply, America happened. The Puritan narrative was convincing enough to assimilate Catholics successfully--and also flexible enough to let them remain Catholics.

Of all the transformations wrought by the alchemy of the Puritan paradigm--that combination of Judeo-Christianity with old-style liberalism--this is the one that would have appeared most remarkable to our 17th-century forebears. And it's a good illustration of the distinctiveness of the American style of assimilation: The typical immigrant Catholic adapted to the American way of life without ceasing to be Catholic; the typical native-born Protestant learned to let go of ancient hatreds without ceasing to be Protestant. The result was an enrichment of both traditions.

McKenna recounts how the Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray--who had written, as late as 1938, that "our American culture, as it exists, is ... a negation of all that Christianity stands for"--came to believe that the American system was actually grounded in a natural-law understanding that was fundamentally Catholic. This discerning analysis of the largely Protestant Founding later had global repercussions, as Murray was a key author of the Vatican II declaration endorsing religious liberty.

And it wasn't just Catholics who transformed the culture while being transformed by it. In the 19th century, southerners were despised by many other Americans: Within abolitionism (a movement in which the Puritan heritage ran deep), some even rooted for an American defeat in the Mexican War as a deserved chastisement for the nation's condoning of southern slavery. Yet today, the South--dramatically changed, yet maintaining somehow its traditional identity--has substantial influence on the national culture, and is America's most visibly patriotic region.

The Puritan language of moral improvement--of what McKenna calls the "craving for purity"--is a scarlet thread through all these events; the book follows it fascinatingly up until the present day. Characters as diverse as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Abraham Lincoln, Whittaker Chambers, censor Anthony Comstock, Sixties radical Staughton Lynd, and eugenicist Margaret Sanger illustrate it in their various ways: some heroic, some misguided, some even pernicious. McKenna's judgments throughout are generous, and his book provides a memorable and thought-provoking account of the core national story: a sometimes limping, sometimes breakneck pursuit of the goodness to which America has been called from its earliest days.